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Live Shipping Rates

Jen
January 03, 2017 05:47

Live Shipping Rates is a Brightpearl app that enables you to generate quotations from carriers when building an order. This means that you won’t need to leave Brightpearl’s order page to find out which delivery services and associated charges are applicable for shipping that order to your customer!

Live Shipping Rates picks up the weight of the order automatically, along with the origin and destination addresses, so you won’t need to enter them again. You can then generate the carriers rates, discuss the options available with your customer (selecting to apply a markup or discount if you wanted to!), and then proceed. When you proceed with a rate, we’ll close our app, and add the rate and set the shipping method on the order for you, ready for you to close the sale.

If you're already a Shipstation customer, you can enter your Shipstation credentials into Live Shipping Rates so that you see your exact contracted rates returned, rather than ours.

How do I install Live Shipping Rates?

To install Live Shipping Rates, simply visit our App Store by selecting it at the top of the page, next to your user name. You’ll find it alongside our other apps, such as Shopify and Amazon. Select ‘Install App’ to proceed.

How do I use Live Shipping Rates?

Once you’ve installed the app, you’ll find an additional button on our order page entitled ‘Get live shipping quote’, located below the order’s contents. Clicking this button will open up Live Shipping Rates in a modal, and preset with information that we’ve taken from the order.

The modal will fetch the combined weight of the order, along with the warehouse and product dimensions, ready for you to select ‘Get Rates’. The product dimensions are displayed in order of Width, Height, Length. You can amend any of the information that we retrieved from the order, and select to Get Rates as many times as you like. If you’ve made changes you need to revert, you can select ‘Reset’, or simply close and reopen the modal.

The rates that you’ll see returned will be every possible rate from our own carrier accounts. If you're shipping from the US, then this will be Fedex, UPS, Stamps.com and Express 1. If shipping from Canada, it’ll be UPS and Fedex. If you’re a Shipstation customer already, then you can enter your own Shipstation credentials. This means that we’ll use your account behind the scenes instead of ours, and therefore you’ll just get your own carriers back, with any contracted rates you may have. Check the ‘Integrating your own Shipstation account’ below for instructions on how to get this setup.

As soon as we get a response back from Shipstation, we’ll display all possible services in the table for you. You can browse through the different carriers by selecting their label.

The rates that we get back are the raw costs we retrieved from Shipstation, which whilst accurate, are in turn estimated. To work with this, we’ve added an input field Markup to the bottom left of the table. Entering a positive value here will apply a percentage markup to all the prices in the table, meaning that you can apply a profit margin or anticipate additional costs. It also works with negative values, so if you wanted to apply a discount for your customer then you can. Rather than zero, the markup field will always default to the last value you entered.

Once you’ve discussed and chosen your rate, select the row, ensure the right shipping method has been assigned, and proceed. You can even create a new shipping method on the fly, saving you some setup! Clicking Proceed will close the app and add the selected rate as a new order row. It’ll also assign the shipping method to the order, and will update the warehouse on the order if you selected a different one within the app.

Get on and close the sale!

Integrating your own Shipstation account

As mentioned, we’re using Shipstation to generate carrier rates, and if you’re a Shipstation user then you can provide us with your own account credentials and gain access to your selected carriers and contracted rates, all within our app!

To do this, open up Live Shipping Rates and select the Settings icon in the top right.

This will present you with the options to select whether you’re about to add credentials for either a US or Canadian account. Make your selection through the green icon on the right.

You’ll then be asked for your Shipstation credentials, which you can find by logging into Shipstation, selecting Settings, and going to API Settings. You’ll find the two values (API secret & API key) that we need at the bottom of the page, enter them into the Live Shipping Rates fields before you and save.

We’ll tell you there and then if we can’t connect, but once successful this account will kick in straight away!

Troubleshooting

I can’t see the option to get rates..

If order is invoiced, you won’t see it! Un-invoice to get it back.

I’m getting the ‘No rates available’ error when trying to get rates..

There are unfortunately a number of different potential causes to this error, but we’re unable to be more specific to you due to the API messages we’re using behind the scenes - as these become more refined, we’ll update our messaging to be so as well. The error can be generated by us legitimately failing to generate any shipping options from your carriers, either because the address isn’t recognised, or the package weight or dimensions are beyond what the carrier will support.

The order weight seems off..

Brightpearl automatically assigns a weight value of 100 to any miscellaneous lines on an order, which are used for freetext items, or shipping rows etc. This means that if your order has any free-text rows on it, then they will be adding 100 to the orders weight value, which may or may not be correct.

I’ve changed my account configuration, the app isn’t recognising it..

To ensure that we can be as fast as possible during the quote generation process, we store your account configuration within the app rather than fetching it every time. The cost of this is that it can take up to an hour for changes to reveal themselves within the app. Given how rarely you change your default shipping nominal code, we think the speed benefits are worth it!